What I Did On My Holidays – Montreal Pt.1

Alas, I went to Montreal before I owned a camera, so this is going to have to be done the ol’ fashioned way… are you sitting comfortably?

The gentleman in my life was invited to attend a conference in Montreal for a few days in 2006, the year of the World Cup, and quickly decided that this was an excellent way to have a holiday.  I leapt upon the bandwagon, swearing that for the days immediately preceding the conference I would eat nothing at all (a pledge I did not keep) so that for those few precious moments when all our needs were theoretically on institutional expenses, I could stuff myself like a barrage balloon.  We would stay in luxury, buy every travelcard and visit every cultural monument expenses could permit… as it turned out, this didn’t entirely happen, but I’ll try not to jump the gun on this story.

Since a writer’s income is, at best, unreliable, and at worst, a bit piss-piddly, I am a natural skinflint.  If my soul is ever captured in art, suspect that attached to the canvas will be a sign advertising a 2-for-1 offer.   But so it goes.  In order to fulfil my skinflint nature, we found the cheapest flights we could which involved the interesting and entirely horrific trick of changing planes at Detriot.  I have been informed that freedom of speech and freedom of thought are, despite the litigation laws of the day, still extant, so let me say two things: 1.  I have never in all my life been so uncomfortable as I was on a Northwestern Flight from London to Detriot and 2.  US border controls are utterly horrific and inane.

We weren’t planning on entering the US at all, since Canada was the final destination, but Detriot Airport didn’t have an international transit lounge and so, diligently, we filled out our green landing cards with questions like ‘were you involved in the Nazi genocide 1939-45?’ and ‘have you come to the USA to commit acts of terrorism’ (pick either box ‘yes’ or box ‘no’.)  We then arrived at customs where for 3 hours, 1000 people tried to shove and elbow there way through the chaos of custom control while one woman with a gun shouted and screamed and on occasion threatened the punters, a very large percentage of whom did not have English as a first language, to get their asses into line.  How I pined for Heathrow Airport and its lovely orderly cues laid out in lovely orderly lines.  How I pined for more than one copper and less than one gun on my side of international arrivals…

Arriving at customs we were subjected to the usual questions.  The answer ‘I’m going to Canada’ was met with appropriate snottiness, and once my fingerprints and retina were scanned, I was let through.  The first sign to greet me on arrival to the US of A was a poster proclaiming ‘US Customs and Immigration – We Are The Best.’  I should point out that on my return via the US back from Canada, my fingerprints and retina was scanned again, and I was met with the statement, ‘I see you’ve never entered the US before’ which leads me perhaps to think that this is bureaucracy too far… but who knows…

Because it had taken 3 hours to get into the US, it only took us 20 minutes to get out again, boarding a little, half-empty plane for Montreal.  We arrived at roughly 2 a.m. local time, and our taxi driver took us to our bed and breakfast where we were, according to both the sign and the man who greeted us, staying in the ‘Princess Charlotte Suite’.  Next to us were the ‘Queen Anne’ rooms and a room related somehow to a Duchess whose details temporarily evade me.  We all shared a bathroom, which alas did not go by the name ‘The Prince Regent Baths’.

Jet lag overcome, we set forth exploring Montreal.

First up, my French is lousy.  I can just about apologise for my inability to speak it, and there my abilities end.  I have, alas, acquired just about enough of a wide and eclectic range of languages that I am now incapable of speaking any at all.  Thankfully, the population of Montreal, while automatically speaking French, was willing to switch to English in the face of my incomprehension.  My boyfriend, having somewhat better French, would make the occasional stab at the language, and on resorting desperately to English, would at the very least be congratulated on the authentic quality of his ‘bonjour’.  Canadian French was, incidentally, not like French as we were taught it at school.  Breakfast was lunch, lunch was dinner, and in between floated a strange abuse of words that would have caused my French teacher’s nose to wrinkle with disdain.  Breakfast was, by the by, one of the great pleasures of Montreal, since it almost invariably consisted of eggy bread with maple syrup, one of god’s greatest gifts to man.

The city itself is…

… well…

… imagine a fairly standard American city laid out on a fairly standard grid pattern.  Stick one hell of a massive river down at its base, around which the streets become tighter and almost European in terms of tourist-trod time, throw in the remnants of major league docks out on the islands, put the menus in both English and French, serve up hamburgers and hot dogs on the same menu as duck casserole, make the buses new and the streets pock-holed and cracked, make the graffiti bright and angry and the department stores universal; stir in regional pride and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, stick a surprisingly steep hill bang smack in the middle, throw in a rusting ancient fun fair of crumbling joy rides and machinery turned into a thing not what it said on the cover, melt a lot of cheese over the chips and you have, in a strange, uneven, yet entirely familiar and recognizable form, Montreal.

Call me a decadent foreign whatsit, but cheese on the chips is a fashion that has yet to really win me over, yet I think it, along with eggy bread and maple syrup, is my dish of choice for defining Montreal.  Other key features that defined it for me was a great long jutt of land heading out to what my mental compass considered the west, surrounded at its tip on all sides by masses of rolling river water laden with heavy freight ships.  We cycled along it one day, and in the curiosity of the ride, encompassing sculpture parks, leafy suburbs, industrial waste grounds and leafy by-ways, I failed to notice that I was a) getting serious sun burnt for the only time in my life and b) had cycled 20 km.  The next day my knees refused to behave properly (cycling is not something I do that often) and I lay in bed experiencing Montreal TV while the boyfriend attended the conference.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer in French was, I thought, about as surreal as it was going to get.  Then Dr Who came on, and there were daleks, and i had to redefine my expectations.  The only bit of French I picked up from that experience came from watching the world cup.  ‘Penalty shoot out’ I worked out after a while, was ‘Le Barrage’, a trivial piece of information that made my linguistic holiday.  I was in a bar when England lost to Paraguay, and curiously enough, no one seemed very sad…

I also discovered the wonderful bonding powers of Neil Gaiman, when, sitting in a coffee shop reading Neverwhere (one of the greatest London fantasies I’ve ever read – although I feel I should point out for my honour’s sake that I read it about 2 months after finishing A Madness of Angels and was a little bit surprised…) – a man turned to me and spoke to me in French.  I mumbled that I didn’t speak French, and he switched easily to English (I have such envy of people who can speak many languages!) and announced that Gaiman was one of the greatest writers of all time.  (A valid point.)  We then fell to talking and, on discovering that I wasn’t Canadian, he cheerfully informed me that he was a surveillance expert who spent his time working for the police on bugging criminals.  Not really expecting to hear this in a coffee shop in Montreal, I blathered emptily and deeply regret now the opportunity to steal his life’s story.  If you’re out there – tell me all!  It was however a pleasant experience in a foreign land, and one which managed to cement in me, especially after the US Customs and Immigration fiasco, the idea that Canada really was better after all…

It turned out that we had chosen our dates for visiting Montreal at a curious time.  Formula 1 had come to the city, and at nearly 9 miles distance we could hear the buzz of the engines like a bee was trapped in the room with us.  Canada Day was also upon us, there was a jazz festival going down, and – joy of joys! – a firework competition had come to Montreal.  I love fireworks.  I mean, I really love fireworks, I’m the girl standing at the front going ‘whee’. In Quebec there also seemed to be Quebec Week happening, but as we discovered, part of Quebec nationalism was being very reluctant to explain itself in any language other than French.  However, our trip to Quebec City and beyond is a story for another time…